Two months after the disaster at Heinlein, he’d finally gone back home. And there, when it was only the two of them, he’d broken down in tears.
His grandmother would have none of it. Her slap had cut off his sobbing with the sudden finality of an executioner’s axe.
“Don’t you dare cry!” Yelizaveta shouted. “You will not weep like a woman over what you weren’t man enough to defend!”
The words hurt far worse than the blow, even though it hadn’t been a dainty smack, but a full-body swing that broke his nose. Blood flowed alongside his tears.
“You are a warrior, Nikolai. You will go back to the stars. You will wash away your failure with the blood of our enemies. Or you are no grandson of mine.”
That sudden shock had done what weeks of therapy or the kind words of his friends had failed to do. The next day, he’d headed back to New Washington, determined to get a new assignment.
Thank you, Babushka, he thought as he went over his fleet’s dispositions for the final time.
The tactics involved in defending a planetary system from attack were constrained by the realities of space travel. The physics of FTL provided advantages and disadvantages for both attacker and defender. An invading fleet couldn’t make the simpler, more efficient warp jumps that took one to the region between a star and its closest planets, because the emergence point would be detected hours in advance, giving the enemy ample time to move its forces to strike the moment the disoriented attackers arrived. To avoid this problem, the aggressors would arrive on the periphery of a system, light-hours away. Distance was time: a warp emergence’s gravity signature propagated at the speed of light. A single ship could hide by appearing near a gas giant or other massive object, but a fleet was too large for such tricks. Their emergence point had to happen as far away as possible, avoiding detection long enough to recover from warp transit. After that, the attackers would make one or more in-system jumps until they finally arrived two to five light seconds away from their ultimate goal: inhabited planets or any installations barring the way to the inner warp gateways, the only way they could travel deeper into enemy space.
Given that communications were limited to the speed of light – the only exception, quantum-entangled systems, were too fragile to be used anywhere but on planetary surfaces – and the impossible volume of space in which an invader might arrive, it was impossible to patrol the edge of a system. The most practical defensive posture was to station one’s ships somewhere close to a star and wait for the enemy forces to reveal themselves. Seventh Fleet should have concentrated its forces near Capricorn-Two until the Imperium or Lamprey fleets (or both of them) arrived.
Humans had been breaking the rules of space warfare for over a century, however, and they had discovered one more way to cheat.
* * *
Gus ‘Bingo’ Chandler had never expected to be bored inside the cockpit of his War Eagle. Killed, yes. Terrified beyond imagining? All too often. But bored?
Bored, and alone. He was the only living being within two light-hours, about as lonely as it got.
Back in the days of the wet Navy, one of the first missions given to naval aircraft had been to act as scouts, searching the seemingly endless oceans for enemy ships. Nobody had expected the War Eagles to do that, however. They were ship-killers, and their sensor systems were rudimentary at best, barely good enough to detect and engage targets within a fraction of a light second. The time the fighters spend in flight was minimal: a few seconds holding station with their targets while they fired on them, and no more than a few minutes returning to their carrier after a warp jump. They could fly at their maximum speed of one-thousandth the speed of light for about three hours before they depleted their power plant and became unable to jump into warp, which would leave them stranded in real space.
Gus had never expected to find himself flying solo in the dark. Unfortunately for him, some genius (word was the bright idea had come from Admiral Kerensky himself) had decided to exploit the fighters’ capabilities (and those of their pilots) in a brand-new way. A way that would completely revolutionize space warfare.
Which sounds great and all, but it’s still damn boring, Gus thought.
He was on the furthest reaches of Capricorn System, well past its major planetary components, near the edge of the star’s heliosphere. There was nothing out there; all he had to look at were distant stars. They’d attached an extra power pack to his bird to give it five more hours of endurance, a sensor module that gave him the same capabilities of a regular starship, and sent him out into the dark. Him and some four hundred fighter pilots, flying in twelve-hour shifts. Their carriers were scattered in a sphere with a radius of ten light hours, and the fighters were spread out even further out, within the limits of their warp jump.
If all they had was standard grav-wave communicators, Kerensky’s bright idea wouldn’t work. Gus’ fighter was sixteen light-hours away from the main fleet. If he detected an emergence, he could either send a message that would take sixteen hours to reach the fleet, or jump back to the Enterprise – a mere four light-hours away, near the limits of the fighter’s warp system – and have the Big E do a second jump all the way back to Capricorn Two. Meanwhile, the rest of the fighter force, scattered over hundreds of light-hours, would have no idea what was going on until a message or the ‘noise’ from the warp emergence reached them, many hours later. Spreading the ships over such distances risked heaving most of them be out of position when the enemy showed up.
Fighter pilots had developed the ability to communicate instantly, however, even over relativistic distances. And that made all the difference. As soon as one War Eagle detected an incoming emergence, all the other pilots would know it. Everyone would warp back to their carriers while the pilots with the main fleet alerted it, and the entire force would be waiting to welcome the enemy with open arms.
That was the theory, at least. They’d been flying deep space patrol missions for eight days now, ever since a scout frigate in Paulus System had detected enemy forces massing there. The few hundred fighters had to cover an ungodly volume of space, and there was a good chance an emergence wouldn’t be detected until it was several hours in. The War Eagles weren’t meant to conduct sustained operations, and the stress on pilots and machines was beginning to wear on everyone. On the other hand, they were only making two warp transits per shift, which wasn’t too bad. Anybody with flight wings on their suit could handle two jumps in a day.
Gus was playing a hand of Solitaire on his imp when his sensor board lit up like a Christmas tree. A goddamn mass emergence, fifty light minutes away! He’d found the enemy fleet!
“Bingo-Four to all CSG elements: warp emergence detected.”
His mental sending reached across the system and let every fighter pilot know what was happening. Within seconds, he’d made the return warp trip to the Enterprise, along with the rest of the Space Wing. Soon enough, the entire fleet would gather at the emergence point, hours before the enemy fleet arrived.
The admiral’s crazy idea had worked.
* * *
“America expects us all to do our duty,” Fleet Admiral Kerensky said. “To all Seventh Fleet elements: proceed to your selected coordinates and prepare to engage in close combat.”
Old Man Carruthers would have quibbled at the mangling of Horatio Nelson’s words, but Kerensky wasn’t a purist, and he thought his modified version did justice to the original orders that preceded the Battle of Trafalgar. The stakes here were much higher, of course, he mused as the Odin prepared for warp transit. If Nelson’s fleet had lost its battle, Great Britain would have survived. If Kerensky lost here, the Imperium would be able to penetrate human space almost unopposed.
Transition.
The ghosts were waiting for him, as usual, along with the number that would haunt him for the rest of his life. There was something else waiting for him in the lonely darkness, however. He hadn’t encountered it before, in or out of null-space: a shadowy presence whose fur
y and hatred matched his own. Kerensky saw a dark reflection of himself during the brief jump, an entity lacking any shred of compassion or remorse, capable only of destruction.
This is what I will become. The thought sent shivers down his spine.
Emergence.
Seventh Fleet arrived to its appointed place without incident and or any serious casualties. The carriers of the scouting force were already there, and the two forces maneuvered into position, spreading out in a c-shaped wall arrayed around the enemy’s arrival point. There was plenty of time to prepare. Everyone was in position two hours before the enemy fleet emerged. Nearly two hundred American warships waited patiently to execute the largest ambush in known galactic history.
When hundreds of vessels arrived from warp at roughly the same time, space rippled with something like Earth’s aurora borealis, except much more brightly. Impossible colors clashed across the display screen as null-space began to disgorge dozens upon dozens of enemy vessels. Seventh Fleet’s sensors could identity a ship before it had completed transit. Even so, it took several minutes to classify the targets filling the holotank’s display.
They picked up a Lamprey battlegroup along the way, Kerensky mused as the readings came in. This is the first time the so-called Allies have sent a joint fleet. And hopefully the last.
The Lhan Arkh Congress had taken severe losses in previous space actions but they’d managed to come up with enough ships to present a credible threat on their own. The Lamprey force consisted of five dreadnoughts, fourteen battleships, twenty-five battlecruisers and sixty lighter vessels. All the heavies were missile platforms. And that fleet was barely enough to comprise a minor component of the Galactic Imperium armada that crowded the tactical display like a cloud of locust.
Sixty-two superdreadnoughts. A hundred dreadnoughts. A hundred and fifty battleships. Three hundred lesser ships, cruisers and destroyers, most of them fast-attack types designed to outrun the enemy and engage it from multiple angles of fire, which would reduce the effectiveness of human warp shields. The price they paid for their greater speed was lower defenses and weaker armament, but they couldn’t be ignored.
The Gimp superdreadnoughts were ridiculous; not even the Wyrms went for that sort of mass. The massive enemy globes were five kilometers wide and had three or four times the displacement of his Pantheon-class ships. The costs involved in producing and crewing those behemoths must have been staggering even for the wealthiest polity in the galaxy. The Imperium had beggared itself to produce that impossible fleet, only to find itself emerging right under the muzzles of Seventh Fleet’s guns.
“We have a target rich environment, ladies and gentlemen,” Kerensky said. “Fire at will.”
The enemy forces were in disarray, their crews all but crippled from the lengthy warp jump. Even humans would be stunned for five to ten minutes after an eight-hour jump. Gal-Imp species fared far worse after lengthy exposures to null-space. The humanoid Dann would be utterly crippled for thirty minutes and severely impaired for close to two hours; the insectile Kreck and amphibious Obans would suffer even longer: an hour of paralysis, and three hours of diminished capacity.
Three hours to kill them all, Kerensky considered as the watched the tactical plots; the battleship Sitting Bull fired the first shots of the battle, a sixteen-gun salvo that smashed two Gimp destroyers seconds after they entered real space. And nearly-helpless doesn’t mean utterly helpless. For all that, this is our only chance to win this battle with acceptable losses.
Seventh Fleet pounced on its confused foe from a light-second away.
The enemy contacts had their force fields up, of course: nobody with any sense made an entry into hostile space without being prepared for battle. But all their defenses were controlled by automatic systems that wouldn’t respond as quickly or efficiently as living controllers. The Alliance Armada was as weak as it would ever be, with its ships clustered more closely together than in a regular battle array. That put multiple targets in range of every main weapon system in the American fleet. If the two forces had been anywhere close in numbers, the outcome wouldn’t have been in doubt. Unfortunately, even those stunned victims would take time to kill, perhaps more time than Seventh Fleet had.
Entire task forces focused their fire on single capital ships while fighter squadrons struck in unison, and one contact after another vanished from the tactical display, sometimes mere seconds after emergence. Other screens showed the gruesome reality behind the disappearing icons: a Gimp superdreadnought broke in half, vomiting flames whose exotic colors meant metals and alloys had been heated beyond their ignition points. Secondary explosions turned both halves into a cloud of spreading fireballs. Tens of thousands of lives were snuffed out like candles in a hurricane, and Kerensky imagined he could hear their dying cries. He felt nothing but cold satisfaction.
One down. Sixty-one to go.
For nearly a minute, Seventh Fleet had it all their own way. Even computers took that long to recover from long warp jumps. Six superdreadnoughts, five battleships and twenty-one lighted vessels died before the enemy fired a single shot in self-defense. They could have destroyed the entire armada in under an hour if those ideal circumstances had lasted.
The easy part was over too quickly, however. Seventh Fleet would have to earn the rest of its kills, and pay full price for them.
“Multiple launches detected,” a tactical officer announced as new contacts appeared on the screen. Very many of them. “Four hundred thousand missiles.”
That’s a record-breaker, was Kerensky’s first mordant thought, followed by: God help us all.
Seventh Fleet engaged the incoming vampires with their enhanced gun systems while a flight of ten thousand interceptor missiles burst forth from the American formation, their multiple warheads designed to destroy five to ten ship-killers apiece. Massive volleys continued to rake the Imperium and Lamprey ships, but a great deal of energy was perforce diverted to secondary gun batteries in order to handle the Sun-Blotter barrage. Only the American fighters continued focusing solely on the capital ships, hoping to destroy them before they could unleash more salvos. Another superdreadnought burst apart, followed by two more battleships, but by then a second swarm of vampires was on its way, three hundred and fifty thousand strong.
On average, each enemy missile took a hundred seconds to reach its target. Twelve thousand of the first wave made it to the final line of defense: Close-In Weapon System lasers mounted on every available hardpoint of the American ships. They had a pitiful effective range of a thousand kilometers and barely enough punch to damage their targets, but their rate of fire that made up for those shortcomings. The spinning multi-barrel lasers had a scant three seconds to make their kills, but there were a lot of them. Enough to knock out another seven thousand vampires, a few of them close enough to filter through warp shields and batter force fields.
Five thousand got through.
Odin shuddered under multiple impacts. Kerensky ignored the motion and the damage inflicted on the flagship; all his attention was on the fleet at large. Blue icons began to blink yellow, red, or black. The battleship Chappaqua lost eight of its twenty main guns and fell out of formation, its grav engines damaged, rendering it dead in space. Six luckless destroyers were blown away by direct hits. Half a dozen other vessels suffered significant damage.
Eight thousand vampires in the second wave struck.
There’d been less of them to start with, but the defenders had been too busy dealing with the first wave to properly target them. The superdreadnought Athena was targeted by one tenth of the barrage, and no ship could survive nearly eight hundred missile hits. Force fields were overwhelmed; her composite armor cracked open in a dozen spots, and even her heavy internal compartments and shields caved under the hammer of multiple plasma explosions. For several seconds, the massive ship trembled and burned; her end was marked by an explosion bright enough to turn the visual display into a solid field of white.
The icon of one of Ame
rica’s greatest ships of the line turned black.
Kerensky’s eyes were fixed on the tactical screen. Odin staggered once again; the lights in the CIC blinked as missiles carved tunnels of destruction into the bowels of the flagship. A quick glance at the status readings showed him the damage was severe but not critical. He noted coldly that seventy-three crewmembers had been killed when several compartments were ripped apart by dozens of missile hits. Two battleship icons followed Athena into the dark; on one screen, he saw the USS Normandy and the nine thousand men and women aboard vanish in a cloud of plasma. Seven fighters were down after a handful of attack runs. Two of them had been destroyed by the enemy point defenses; the other five were simply… gone.
Wounded but still in the fight, the Odin consigned an enemy superdreadnought to the flames with a simultaneous salvo of all its main guns. One sixth of the heaviest Imperium vessels were dead, a mere three minutes into the fight, a loss of tonnage and personnel of historic proportions. On the other hand, th e loss of the Athena represented one-third of Seventh Fleet’s equivalent ship class. The exchange rate had gone from one-sided to unsustainable in the space of a few minutes.
More Sun-Blotter volleys followed, but they were far smaller: the external missile magazines mounted on the enemy ships had been emptied in the initial salvos, and reloading them was impossible in the middle of a battle. The follow-up swarms were merely sixty thousand strong, and only a handful of them survived long enough to inflict damage. By then, however, the enemy energy guns were finally returning fire. Their gunnery wasn’t well-coordinated or aimed, since most of the enemy crews were still incapacitated, but their volume, while diffuse, was still enormous. Without Seventh Fleet’s warp shields, its ships would have been immolated it in a matter of minutes. With them, the hammering would go on for hours before the American ships fell.
The time for maneuver and stratagem was over; all that remained were broadside exchanges and missile swarms. Fireballs and bolts of energy lit up the endless dark of deep space as hundreds of ships continued their dance of destruction. The only weapons that could turn the tide were his War Eagles, darting in and out of the enemy formation to bring sudden death upon them.
In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4) Page 15
